Epigraphs: The Vote: Women’s Fierce Fight, Part VII, Chapter 23
The vote is the emblem of your equality. This sentence by Carrie Chapman Catt is the epigraph for The Vote: Women’s Fierce Fight, Part VII, Chapter 23, Justice Bell: August-September 1920
By August it was clear—the fight for the thirty-sixth state was down to North Carolina and Tennessee. On August 17 ratification by North Carolina legislators seemed possible, until the floor leader of the opposition made a deft move and got a resolution passed that deferred action until a regular meeting of the legislature in 1921. TENNESSEE SLENDER THREAD UPON WHICH SUFFRAGE HOPES HANG, warned a Chattanooga newspaper.
At 10:30 a.m., Speaker Seth Walker, an anti-ratificationist, banged his gavel to open the session, and soon
On August 26, 1920, the U.S. Secretary of State signed the Proclamation of the Nineteenth Amendment. EQUAL SUFFRAGE IS LAW OF THE LAND, proclaimed a front-page headline in a Pensacola, Florida, newspaper. An elaborated ceremony was held in Independence Square in Philadelphia,
Top images: Frankie J. Pierce, founder of the Nashville Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs. In May 1920, at a convention held in the Tennessee Capitol, she addressed an audience of all-white women, telling them “We are interested in the same moral uplift of the community in which we live as you are . . . .We are asking only one thing—a square deal. Middle right image: Tennessee Woman Suffrage Monument, Centennial Park, Nashville, unveiled August 26, 2016. The five women, represented by seven-foot tall bronze statues are: Frankie Pierce back left, Sue Shelton White, back center; Abby Crawford Milton, back right; Carrie Chapman Catt, front left; Anne Dallas Dudley, front right. Middle left image: Burn Memorial by Alan LeQuire representing Febb Burn and her son Harry Burn, Knoxville, unveiled 2018. Bottom image: the original Justice Bell, Washington Memorial Chapel, Valley Forge National Park. (Click on image to enlarge.)
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